Tuesday, 17 June 2014

Journal of the Plague Year: Malcolm Cross interview

Over the next three days Team Abaddon will be picking the brains of the three authors contributing to Journal of the Plague Year with questions courtesy of Abaddon editor extraordinaire David Moore. Taking "one small step" for author-kind and first up in the firing line we have Orbital Decay's Malcolm Cross; over to you David and Malcolm.

DM: So,
space: pretty fucking terrifying, judging by Orbital Decay. We’re guessing that
must have been a sobering bit of research?

MC: Space
is terrifying. It's one of the relatively few environments in which humanity
has no business being. We can climb mountains unaided, we can free-dive to
incredible depths, with training we can go almost anywhere on our little world
with virtually no tools whatsoever, and the penalties for failure start with
discomfort, not death.

It
doesn't just start in space, either. Some of the earliest deaths in space
exploration took place on the ground, fires during equipment testing. There
were the shuttle disasters, Challenger and Columbia. Hell, the first attempt to
dock with the first space station (Salyut 1) failed, and the second attempt,
successful, killed the entire crew of Soyuz 11 through depressurization during
their re-entry burn after a problem undocking from Salyut 1. All of these men
and women were being supported by superpowers, assisted by hundreds (if not
thousands) of engineers. None of them had a chance.

But,
thankfully, there are more successes than losses, more close shaves than
catastrophes. Some of them hilarious, turds floating around the Apollo 10
capsule, some of them scary, like the fire aboard Mir.

Space
exploration is a potentially lethal game, even when everything goes right.

DM: Orbital Decay digs pretty deeply into the epidemiology of the Cull. Is that a
particular area of interest for you? Did the series canon present you much
difficulty when writing these parts?

MC: Ooof.
The series canon is a topic in itself -- I wound up reading the entire series
(eleven books, back then) in a little over three weeks, specifically to figure
out what was going on. The Afterblight Chronicles, and the Cull, have passed
through a lot of hands over the years, and I have to say, there have been some
dissenting viewpoints on how it all went down.

I've
always enjoyed trying to figure out just how seemingly impossible fictional
things might be real. I think my first semi-plausible crack at it was when
Street Fighter 2 was brand new, and I wasn't quite ten years old. You know how
they throw fireballs around in that game? Yeah, well, when space shuttles come
back to Earth they get surrounded by fire just like that because they're
moving so fast the friction burns the air and obviously that is how the
Street Fighter characters can throw fire around. Obviously. (Footnote: Actually
the air ahead of the spacecraft is massively compressed by the shockwave of its
motion through the atmosphere, and that causes far more heating than friction
does, but I had no idea about that as a kid.)

Thankfully,
the real science behind viruses and the seemingly impossible horror of the Cull
are far easier to meld together for a plausible explanation. One of the key
mysteries behind the Cull -- how it so selectively attacks almost everyone bar
those with O-Negative blood -- was one of the most focal.

To
grossly oversimplify, if you're AB-Positive, you have no blood-group relevant
antibodies, and you have all three antigens -- A, B, and Rhesus -- on the
cell-walls of your red blood cells, which act as a kind of flag to tell your
immune system that this is one of your cells, not something invading your body.
If you're O-Negative, you have none of these antigens, and you have every
single one of the antibodies that attack the antigens as if they're an
infectious substance. You're protected. (You also can't receive a blood
transfusion from anyone else, but you can give blood to just about anyone -- so
do consider blood donation if you're so fortunate!)

Now,
when you learn that some viruses tear a piece out of its host-cell's walls and
wrap themselves up with it, effectively camouflaging it against the body's
immune system... well. It doesn't take a microbiologist (and I'm not one) to
see the potential mayhem if this trait had to arise in one of the viruses which
alter a cell's DNA specifically to change how it divides and what kind of
tissue it produces -- some of these are the oncoviruses, responsible for some
types of cancer. It could be something very much like a burglar armed with a
set of keys to your house, trying each one in turn until something fits!

DM: On
which note, what was it like working in a shared world?

MC: I
mentioned reading all eleven books in three weeks-ish? No world bible back
then.

That
part was exhausting. Like wandering into the minotaur's maze, but thankfully I
left a thread marking my path for others to follow, in the form of a lot of
clippings and some other notes which David Moore's now the custodian for. But
it's also a lot of fun, adding your own little branch to what is now a very
large (if scabrous and plague-ridden) tree.

It's
not your usual series, either. We meet many of the characters once, or over the
course of a trilogy, and then move on to some other part of the
post-apocalypse. One of the reason the series title -- 'The Afterblight
Chronicles' -- is so very apt. It's like working on a collaborative history of
the world's end. Almost a communal meditation on what it is to lose everything.

Certainly,
it's unique. I spent a lot of time worrying about getting something 'wrong',
early on. Some misplaced detail or element of timing that'd ruin it for the
fans, doing something that'd tread on another of the authors' toes, something
like that. But, in the end, by stepping carefully and becoming a fan of the
series myself, it became quite a lot of fun to add a bit on to what's already
there.

DM: Orbital Decay is arguably unusual among post-apocalypse stories in that it
occurs right at the very outset of the apocalypse. Does that change the tone
much?

MC: There
are a few other stories that do it, some recent zombie books, and Mira Grant's
'Parasite' is certainly set in what seems to be the early phases of a unique
little apocalypse, but it is definitely unusual. Most works take the apocalypse
for granted, or at the very least skip over it to get to the good parts.

As
a result, I think a lot of post-apocalyptic literature counterintuitively
focuses on growth. What we gain, how we fill the now empty gaps, how we
survive, how we (hopefully) find a new way to thrive. The single seedling
sprouting from a cratered landscape. A new equilibrium with the world around
us, holistic and all that, yeah?

Orbital
Decay is about being stuck in a tiny little can hundreds of miles over the
ground while everything you ever knew, friends, family, and nations, die
choking on their own blood and all you can do is watch.

It's
very heavy metal.

More
seriously? I think it's about mourning and redemption. Looking loss in the eye
and coming to terms with it on that basis, rather than the long and gradual
process of putting it behind you, finding closure, and moving on -- which has
been done very skilfully in the two Afterblight trilogies, Scott K. Andrews's
School's Out books and Paul Kane's Hooded Man series.

In Malcolm Cross' Orbital Decay, the team in the International Space Station watch helplessly as the world is all but wiped out. Exiled from Earth by his blood-type, astronaut Alvin Burrows must solve the mystery of the "Pandora" experiment, even as someone on the station takes to murdering the crew one by one...

Orbital Decay is the first novella in the coming post-apocalyptic omnibus collection Journal of the Plague Year out 3rd July 2014 (UK) and 12th August 2014 (US).